Honda Super-N review

‘You drive very fast,’ said our translator, breathlessly. ‘I had no idea a Kei car could go so fast; we were in the air. These cars are for mothers and girls…’

The poor women had to sit in the back of this new Honda pocket rocket as I lapped a challenging handling course at the company’s Tochigi R&D centre about an hour north of Tokyo by bullet train – I wasn’t going as fast as those extraordinary 200mph Shinkansen trains, but I hadn’t been hanging around, either.

But Honda isn’t going to sell this car as a funny little city runaround to mums, dads, girls and boys unless they’re of the rather rapid variety. No, this tiny Kei car is a full-on, four-door sports hatch based on Honda’s sit-up-and-beg N One, first launched as a petrol Kei in 2012, which is a regular sight on the roads and in the shopping malls of Japan. The cute looks are said to have been inspired by the original 1960s N360, one of Honda’s very first passenger cars; the N letter apparently standing for norimono or vehicle.